The modus operandi of the LGBT lobby and the Bolsheviks are strikingly similar. But that’s the case with every power-grabbing scheme. A hundred years ago the Bolsheviks pretended to be the champion of the “workers.” Likewise, today statists call themselves the champions of gays and transgenders. It’s basically the same dynamic. The LGBT Lobby serves ultimately to consolidate power in the hands of the elite few. So what else do these movements have in common?

The abolition of the autonomous family as the ultimate goal.

Propaganda tactics that rely heavily on smear campaigns and cultivate the fear of becoming a non-person.

Conformity of expression through obedience to political correctness.

Replacement of free exchange of commerce and ideas with ironclad regulations and censorship

Nomenklatura — an elite clique in power — rules over all and directs a mammoth bureaucracy

The takeover of the media at the outset in order to control the narrative and silent dissenters

That’s just for starters. And if the “Equality Act” is passed by Congress, you can bet that compliance will be enforced and dissent will be punished. That’s a censorship act window-dressed as non-discrimination. It has nothing to do with protecting any minority demographic. The minority demographic — in this case gays, lesbians, transgenders — are simply being used as pawns. Their grievances are being used as a pretext to consolidate all power into the hands of an elite mob. This is very much in keeping with the pattern of the Bolsheviks who cherry-picked winners and losers once they took on the mantle of “vanguard” — or protector — of the workers. The Bolshevik mob never cared about the working class, except as a useful propaganda tool in their bid to grab power. In the Soviet Union, those deemed “counter-revolutionary” would be labelled as “enemies of the people.” We see the same pattern today with the LGBT lobby. And it will get much worse if the “Equality Act” goes into effect, giving the government the power to punish those it deems “anti-gay.”

So, at the end of the day, what have you got? Answer: a society ruled by elites, or a “nomenklatura.” Your currency is political connections that you “earn” through compliance with the mob. That’s how mammoth bureaucracies lock in power for their rulers. Instead of a society based upon the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas, you end up with gatekeepers — all up and down the bureaucratic ladder — who make sure the only kind of currency in use is political compliance and connections. In this sort of power structure all totalitarian societies poison personal relationships. They cultivate scarcity, which creates a nasty dog-eat-dog mentality. They cultivate ignorance so that free thought is dimmed. It’s a divide-and-conquer scheme in which people become separated as never before. As history has proven time and again in such cases, it is submission — and not resistance — that is truly futile.

I often write and talk about how power elites have pretty much taken over all of the outlets of communication. I’ve assigned an acronym to the main three outlets: “HAM”– for Hollywood, Academia, and the Media. Today I want to recommend to you a major essay that focuses on a vastlly more powerful outlet of communication: the “hidden sphere.” The hidden sphere is basically private life, which is outside the realm of HAM. This means the activities and exchanges that happen in your personal relationships and your private conversations. And it is these interactions which are actually considered the biggest prize of power elites. If you think what you say as “just one person” is not important, think again. The entire point of political correctness is to shut you up as “just one person.” Being “just one person” makes you extremely powerful because what you freely say to others who like you and trust you — whether a neighbor, classmate, co-worker — has the power to shatter the fragile narratives of PC elites.

In the upper right hand corner of this blog, you can see a quote that’s been there from the beginning:

” . . . his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings, and because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination.”

That’s from Vaclav Havel’s extraordinary essay “The Power of the Powerless.” In it he speaks of the hidden sphere as the nucleus of freedom because it is that place in which people have one-on-one interactions that allow for the cultivation of trust and the cross pollination of ideas. It might start very small, but as the ideas are pollinated by those who are influenced, there is a ripple effect of truth that becomes irresistible. Here’s another excerpt:

The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the perspective of power, very dangerous.”

Havel was an independent thinker and a lover of truth and freedom in communist Czechoslovakia. This made him dangerous to the totalitarian regime. Indeed, one could say he spearheaded the “Velvet Revolution” that ended communism in Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Havel then served as president of the Czech Republic. His essay can be a bit difficult to plow through – and it’s very long — but it’s fascinating because it reveals to each of us our immense power as individuals. Please get familiar with it, at least its basic premises. From it we can learn how our decision to speak truth in love is an action that goes beyond itself. It illuminates its surroundings and the consequences of that illumination are incalculable. The Hidden Sphere is the sword that can slice through the Gordian Knot of totalitarianism.

We talked about how political correctness creates a spiral of silence that ends up separating people as never before. PC not only squashes civil discourse, but creates a strange and rigid polarization in society that spawns destructive caricatures of others. As someone who used to identify on the Left, I understand well what a mindset that stereotypes others can do to people’s ability to connect. The point of this kind of propaganda is to centralize power by first dividing people, quite often by demonizing those who don’t subscribe to the narrative. It breaks up personal relationships. And this allows those wielding power to control who says what to whom, and to dictate who relates to whom. People who obey the narrative are allowed to partake of society, while those who don’t subscribe to the narrative end up as “nonpersons.” This taps into my theme that personal relationships are the ultimate source of human power. Ground zero for functioning relationships is the family unit. That’s exactly why the family is the prime target for destruction by today’s forces of political correctness.

PC corrupts the language, and when the language is corrupted, thought processes become corrupted as well, and people are more easily manipulated into mindless conformity. And when the masses can be mobilized to support the agendas of power elites, things never end well for human dignity. History has taught us this lesson time and again.

We have no choice but to resist. Ultimately, this is an asymmetric war that has to be fought persistently, one-on-one, and face-to-face by putting a human face on what we believe. By engaging with those we know in daily life, we can re-create the ripple effect of true community that political correctness is designed to destroy.

At some point the social separation enforced by political correctness begins to feel a bit like solitary confinement when it comes to expressing our thoughts. That should give us a hint about why we are susceptible to mass delusion. We are social animals and feeling isolated from others has unhealthy effects on our minds. It causes dysfunction in how we relate to others. Separation demoralizes and harms individuals and communities alike. But when we feel happily connected, our morale is boosted.

My article expands on these ten 10 key points to consider in how to break through that machine:

1. Drop political correctness and propaganda compliance.

2. Realize that personal relationships are the target of PC.

3. Human Separation is the end result of PC.

4. Fear fuels the PC machine.

5. PC is oiled by mass ignorance.

6. Coerced silence kills democracy.

7. Resistance is the only antidote.

8. A single person has immense power.

9. “Suprising validators” are like superpowers in resistance.

10. Let’s get out and engage.

We’re living in an era of extreme social and political polarization. People are more loath than ever to engage with others who might have opposing views. People who hold views that are not politically correct are self-censoring in record numbers. This means we are separated from one another as never before in terms of exchanging our sincere thoughts and opinions on how we see the world. This is a really dysfunctional way for a society to operate. Political correctness fuels this separation by manipulating the primal human fear of being isolated and rejected from others. Ironic, isn’t it? We try to avoid isolation by silencing ourselves, which only causes us to paint ourselves further into a corner of solitary confinement.

In summary, the Gordian Knot of totalitarianism contains at least three essential ingredients: family breakdown, censorship, and ignorance.

Family breakdown leads to community breakdown, and that leads to a sense of alienation and dependency. That, in turn, results in the sort of unrest we’ve recently seen in places like Ferguson and Baltimore.

Censorship is inherent in political correctness, but it’s coming down the pike full force if Congress enacts the Orwellian-named “Equality Act.” The purpose of censorship of that sort is to inhibit communication among individuals and therefore obstruct autonomous personal relationships. It sows distrust and fear and helps build a surveillance state.

Ignorance is cultivated first through the erosion of family bonds and community bonds because this separation destabilizes a person’s sense of self and makes it difficult to connect the dots about reality in the world around us. It gets worse as the forces of this destabilization promote more ignorance by throwing knowledge of the historical record down the memory hole. At that stage of ignorance, fewer and fewer have a clue as to how propaganda works or how we are being manipulated.

At the end of the day, in such a regime only a small clique of rulers dictate who may say what to whom and who may relate to whom. As described in the panel illustrated at the FDR Memorial pictured here, these are folks who “seek to establish a system of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers.”

Unfortunately, that’s the goal of the agendas that are built into this Gordian Knot: control of all personal relationships. Those who are working to build this dystopia might call it a “new order.” They might call it a “transformation.” They can call it whatever they like. But it is definitely not new and definitely not an order. It’s just an ancient divide-and-conquer scheme based on the sin of human pride and power mongering. “Order” turns out to be something like the inner workings of a clock in which people are simply cogs in a machine and there is no way out.

It’s same old, same old. And history has shown that it never ends well. We can only slice through it from the bottom up. Through individuals who share their knowledge of the truth, speaking in trust and developing real friendship with others. This creates just the sort of ripple effect that family breakdown and censorship and ignorance are meant to prevent. It creates the ripple effect that can free us. Self-cocooning with like-minded folks is a trap. There is no media or pop culture or academia to help out with this. Those forces are currently all tied up in the Gordian Knot. It’s now an asymmetric war in which we must all invest in the ripple effect of one-on-one communication.

Ostriches acting like a lot of people these days. (Hey, maybe we can try talking to the one on the Left? He probably doesn’t even know he’s on the Left.)

Sometimes it feels as though we’re living in a tangled maze-like machine with a thousand moving parts. If we focus on any given issue, any particular moving part, we lose lose sight of the big picture. Sometimes we deliberately ignore the big picture. Sometimes we just can’t see it. And, yet, other times the big picture might seem so daunting and scary we put our heads in the sand, like the ostriches in the photo here.

But it’s critical we step back and assess this machine in its entirety. What is its fuel?? What does it feed on? In a word, dysfunctional relationships — and especially the declining ability of people to relate to one another as human beings equally deserving of human dignity. We can see this in the hype that directs us to view ourselves as members of select identity groups or only as a part of an activist community. Only certain lives matter in this scenario. We’re all being pigeon-holed based on what we look like or where we come from. We’re being driven apart. Polarized. Atomized. This sort of polarization is pure poison for happy and healthy human relationships.

And that’s the big picture we all need to step back and see.

What causes people to paint themselves into such corners? I think people get sucked into this trap for a variety of reasons, but the trap cannot be laid without two essential ingredients: ignorance and enforced silencing. Cultivated ignorance and enforced silencing is the fuel of dysfunctional relationships that feed this machine.

Ignorance

Ignorance disables a person’s ability to think deeply and independently about an issue, and even about themselves and their own motives. Family breakdown is a huge contributor to ignorance because it separates children emotionally and often physically from their first teachers about the world around them — their parents. Sadly, our public schools and universities have been cultivating ignorance for decades. This happens not only through dumbed down curricula, but also through enforcement of conformity through a regime of political correctness.

Enforced Silencing Kneecaps Relationships

Let’s never forget that when you cut off communication, you cut off the potential for human relationships. While practical ignorance undermines the ability to think clearly and discern manipulations, political correctness cultivates the fear of being ridiculed and isolated for speaking logically about anything. PC cultivates ignorance by preventing people from hearing anyone share insights on a non-PC view. It encourages them to smear the “other” and prevents them from seeing such people as human. School curricula also rely more and more on the raw emotion of students in “thinking” about things. (You have Bill Ayers to thank for th at.) Popular culture is steeped in blindness to reason. And, in the end, an ignorant person is a dependent person and great fodder for mass mobilization and a culture of grievance, spite, and anger.

I think if we could bring this picture into focus, people would be better equipped to slice through the overall problem and see the humanity in others.

A complex problem is sometimes referred to as a Gordian Knot. You may know the Greek legend or myth in which an oracle prophesied that anyone who could undo the complex and intricate knot tied by King Gordius of Phrygia would rule all of Asia. Many tried and failed. But when Alexander the Great was confronted with it, he didn’t bother with convention. Legend has it that he stepped back and just sliced right through the knot with his sword. We sometimes call this kind of solution “thinking outside the box.”

I ponder this story as I consider how crazy and complicated our modern problems have become.

In my teen years at school we used to refer to the news as “current events.” Homework sometimes included looking at a newspaper or a network news program. Then there’d be a report to the class.

Fast forward to today and things are moving so fast and furious in unpredictable directions that “current events” seems an antiquated term. We have layers upon layers of crises that have congealed into a problem so humongous that it confronts us like a complex Gordian knot of cosmic proportions. How can the damage ever be undone? The past month alone contains enough angst and lunacy to last generations. We’ve seen the expose of Planned Parenthood’s racket in trafficking organs from aborted children, with graphic videos that give us a fresh perspective on the horrors and sorrows of abortion. Then we have the transgender hype being fed to us 24/7 by Hollywood and the media, with a ramped up campaign to push gender confusion hard onto school children.

And now that the Supreme Court has legally abolished marriage as a male-female institution, we are about to see the biggest piece of censorship legislation ever. It pretends to be an anti-discrimination bill and goes by the name “Equality Act.” The idea is to mete out punishment to anyone who doesn’t get with the agenda to re-program en masse our language and our thoughts. In particular, it aims to re-design everyone’s thoughts about personal relationships. That’s because ultimately all personal relationships emanate from organic marriage. How so? you may ask. Because that’s the union that produces citizens who build communities in which other personal relationships are spawned. Destabilize marriage and you’ve destabilized the basis for functioning families. Without functioning, autonomous families, we can’t have functioning and self-reliant communities. In the end, the State wins big.

But the landscape is becoming littered with more and more rabbit holes being dug on a daily basis by our government: data-mining, the replacement of personal medical care with medicine-by-bureaucracy, debilitating multi-trillion dollar debt, the cultivation of ignorance in the schools through enforced conformity by programs such as Common Core, the non-stop attacks on religion.

On the international scene, it’s just as much a Twilight Zone. We have the Obama Administration’s weird Iran deal that puts the world closer to war. At the same time, the White House turns a blind eye to the mass killings of Christians in the Middle East. The cult of ISIS marches on to replace the Rule of Law with Sharia Law. In the meantime, the Administration is intent on force-feeding the gay agenda on a global scale, including to under developed countries like Kenya where he lectured the leadership last month. The list goes on and on and on.

The media and Hollywood do little but feed and cultivate attitudes of self-absorption. Academics also foster self-absorption in their college students who now can’t read literary classics because the content is too “triggering” for their tender emotions. We should ask: How on earth can people have real relationships or establish any kind of true community if everyone is so obsessed with their own delicate sensibilities? The answer is: we can’t.

Healthy personal relationships need a foundation of common reality and common language through which people can communicate. Most of all, they need a common belief that there is inherent worth and dignity in all human beings, not just themselves.

So as more folks sink deeper into believing life is all about them, they are more liable to end up like Bruce Jenner: obsessed by the urge to project an imagined persona everywhere and eager to suck up whatever oxygen might be in any given room. Or like abortionists who must callous their souls in order to live day to day.

As the Arthur Ashe award in honor of Jenner’s gender transition proved the other night, we seem close to hitting rock bottom. Turning one’s fetish into a cause celebre might be a nervy thing to do, but it doesn’t resemble the virtue we’ve traditionally called “courage.” All the less so because of the heaping helpings of adulation, support, doting, protection, fawning, and heavy shielding the media and special handlers have been giving Jenner for doing so.

In fact, nary a word has been spoken about Bruce Jenner’s fault in a February car crash that killed a woman and left several others injured. (Though one of the drivers involved has publicly pointed out that Jenner’s lack of personal responsibility made him ill suited for the award.)

Against this scenario of craven self-worship and self-obsession, it shouldn’t surprise us that a top abortionist and director at Planned Parenthood would brag about harvesting organs from unborn children. Deborah Nucatola told undercover associates of the Center for Medical Progress how she personally goes about this with babies up to 24 weeks gestation. She was videotaped saying:

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part. I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

It’s a ghoulish business that shocks people of conscience. But we live less and less in a society that respects and understands the value of conscience. Instead, Planned Parenthood reflects the attitude of Dr. Josef Mengele who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi Germany. And, of course, of its founder Margaret Sanger who was a full blown eugenics enthusiast whose counsel the Nazis sought in the 1930’s.

How did our culture get to this place? I think, in part, by accepting the antiquated notion of “modernity” or “progress” as though it is something enlightened. Using abortion as a means of sexual “liberation” only serves to numb us, to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. There’s no room for true human connection in such putrefied places devoid of human worth.

The other day I was a guest on the Steve Mayo Show, out of Westchester County, NY: WVOX 1460 AM. The hosts — Steve Mayo and Cornelia Morse — were fantastic. It was a great conversation focusing on my Federalist article “How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion.” And the discussion will be continued at some point. If I could extract one line of mine from this interview that I’d want you to remember, it’s this one:

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh talked at great length about my recent article in The Federalist: “How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion.” As you can imagine, I was thrilled to see this topic get exposure to such a wide audience. Because, as I’ve said before, it is absolutely key that we understand the processes and methods of coercive persuasion if we are ever going to be able to defeat them. Let’s set aside the swirling mess of issues for a little while — Obamacare, Common Core, climate change, immigration, marriage, transgenderism, and on and on and on and on . . . . Those pushing “transformation” know that pitching us this vortex of chaos is a critical element in the game of attrition they are playing with us.

So I propose that we should instead focus on the Machinery itself. What exactly drives the propaganda machine and how does it work on us? I fear that people of goodwill have been in the dark about these dynamics for too long. Let’s shift focus and look behind that curtain. Because we’re dealing with a war on reality itself. You and I know that we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Here is the link to the text of Rush’s lengthy commentary related to my article: